Recently, wide-area information services which can be utilized by end users have rapidly increased, since networks are extended and business opportunities through networks have increased, typically through the Internet and personal communications. However, for instance, in interfaces such as WWW (World Wide Web) presently provided in the Internet, end users must know connection destinations of information providing computers, and also cannot be connected to a plurality of information providing computers at the same time. As a consequence, it is rather difficult for end users to find a truly required service from among a huge amount of information and effectively utilize this truly necessary service without having advance knowledge of the service and also without cumbersome operations.
Also, when a personal computer communication system is connected to an information providing computer, this personal computer communication system merely provides a communication path to the information providing computer, or simply lends a database to an information provider. Accordingly, end users should be individually connected with the system of the information provider, should sequentially retrieve contents of services, and should propose the system utilization.
The contents of the present information services are fixedly defined, so that the same services are provided in response to the same requests irrelevant to such a fact, e.g., who is an end user, and conditions of the system when the service is received.
The above-described conventional techniques suffer the following described problems, since there are preconditions, namely, the end users are connected to the information providing computers, and thereafter the end uses can newly retrieve the contents of the provided services and can newly propose to utilize the service; the end user cannot be connected to a plurality of information providing computers at the same time; and also only the information of the service request is sent from the end user, and the information providing computer neither receives, nor holds the personal information of the end user.
(1) It is difficult to find out a service desired by an end user. In other words, even when a certain information providing computer provides a service desired by the end user, if the end user does not know of the existence of this information providing computer and/or connection destinations, then the end user cannot utilize this service. It is practically difficult for the end user to personally grasp a huge number of service contents of information providing computers and a large number of connection destinations. Thus the end user can hardly utilize his truly desirable services.
(2) It is difficult to utilize a suitable service, depending upon a change in conditions. In other words, not only a large number of information providers enter into information service businesses every day, but also the presently available services of the existing information providing computers are frequently changed and/or added with other services every day. End users can hardly, personally grasp all of these changes. As a result, even though is highly likely that better services are newly added, the end users may emd up fixedly utilizing specific services. Also system environments and qualities of information/services may change contents of services which can give higher satisfaction to the requests of the end users. It is practically difficult that the end users systematically evaluate these conditions and thus select the proper services in accordance with this change.
(3) It is difficult to discriminate services from each other based on desires and service utilization histories of end users. The desires and service utilization histories of end users are grasped only by these end users themselves. As a consequence, the information providing computers cannot select the proper services which can provide the higher rate of satisfaction to the requests of the respective end users, but therefore the end users themselves must retrieve their desirable services and also must hold/manage the service utilization histories.
(4) When services of a plurality of information providing computers are integrated to be received, procedures by end users become cumbersome. That is, when a complex service provided by a plurality of information providing computers is received, an end user must be sequentially connected with the respective information providing computers, must retrieve the contents of the individual services, must propose the individual service utilizations, and must adjust these services individually. Also, the end user is required to pay his fee to the received services from the respective information providers. In particular, an abundance of time and workloads on the part of the end user are required so as to adjust combinations of the plural services.